Bad Penny » Gaming

Local Game Shops

Ian Gorrie — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:42:28 +0000

High quality local geek shops are hard to find in Seattle. I have been accustomed in the past to running out to the local hardcore lair to pick up some OEM hardware, but that’s just not happening here any longer.

My theory is that Amazon has destroyed all margins for local geek dens and so they’re not around anymore. We’re left with the horror of Best Buy, Gamespot, Frys (in Renton) and Target.

I had some hopes that Pink Godzilla Gorilla (they were forced to change their name recently) would be able to handle pre-ordered games in a reasonable way, but it doesn’t look like they’re going to have their act together any time soon. It took them a solid week and a half to get their hands on Assassin’s Creed 2 for me. Waiting a week and change in anticipation to play it may have been the best thing about this game. The state of affairs with big conglomerate game companies putting out horrible games has really become endemic. EA and Ubisoft are prime examples of companies that buy up properties that were fun and creative and suck the life from them to marginalize the art into a sufficient-quality-to-ship model.

It honestly makes me sad.

After determining that there were no options in local fun businesses that I could have that sense of gamer community with here in town, I went back to Amazon and discovered something.

They can drop it off at my door on launch day for no additional charge. Not a bad consolation prize, though I think it is dependent on being an Amazon Prime subscriber.

I’ll give it a try with Bayonetta and Darksiders and see how it goes. They were some of my favorites of E3 and, like many projects lately, have been delayed into next year.

Professional Starcraft: An interview with Cholera

Ian Gorrie — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 06:26:11 +0000

I had the opportunity to speak to Cholera, a hilarious english language StarCraft commentator, about the state of international competition, the upcoming release of StarCraft 2 and what it will mean to the sport, and what makes a pro player.

Additionally, he provided a list of his favorite StarCraft matches:

Bisu v Pokju

Savior v Nal_ra (game 1 , part 1, of 4 game series):

Bisu v Savior [2007 GomTV MSL finals] (not commentated in English, game 1):

Hyuk v STX Soul (game 1, part 1, of 4 game series):

A few more videos:

Since people have short memories, you should include the hilarious Hyuk v Upmagic from May, 09, to remind everyone of how hilariously bad he was before the Miracle:

Xiaozi v Satanik (50 minute Zerg v Zerg and one of my favorite non-Korean games):

Flash v GGPlay Set 3 [2008 Incruit OSL Round of 8] (you can hear three commentators’ jaws hit the floor):

Do note that many of these matches are multi-part to get around the 10 minute youtube video limitation. The next segment should be in the video response section.

PAX 09

Ian Gorrie — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:45:57 +0000

PAX, to me, seems like an unlikely event. Ten years of growth and loyalty to a couple of guys that wrote a web comic that struck to the heart of games and gamers and developed into a large and thriving community of game loving individuals and nerdcore people in general. I remember when they hooked me.

Unprecedented numbers of attendees. So many that they filled the entirety of the huge Convention Center.

Last year (2008) PAX had over 58,000 attendees. This year, ticket sales are capped at 75,000 and there are less than 2,500 tickets left!

Quoted from their forums. With the exception of a few day passes, PAX 09 was completely sold out. That’s a lot of gamers.

Ian’s Favorites of PAX:

The free play area. Anyone could check out titles from a huge library of games and play them with other attendees.
Indi game showcase: The PAX 10
Left 4 Dead 2 (the three levels of demo were really great)
Brink, the new FPS RPG-ish title from Splash Damage and Bethesda
Shank
Gunnar digital lifestyle specs.

Crowd Favorites:

Left 4 Dead 2
Borderlands
Blizzard [ Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and the latest World of Warcraft expansion ]
Cosplayers (with a good gallery at Kotaku)
The handheld play area with tons of lounging around pillows
The TMNT bus

Here is a few details on really neat things that escaped the central focus of the convention and captured mine.

The Peregrine:

I made the expected powerglove references at their booth, but I really wanted to see how this worked. I didn’t really get a feeling about how this would make pro gamers faster over a keyboard, as they claimed that is saved an extra 20-30 actions at the pro gaming level per minute. It is a different way to play. Is it better? I’d like to hear about your experiences with it.

Gunnar Optics:

These are described as reducing eye strain and the affects of Computer Vision Syndrom (CVS).

I found that I could detect a big difference in increased quality of vision almost immediately. Since I’m in front of screens for a lot of my waking life, I bought three pair.

We also seem to be entering the age of the MMO FPS RPGs. Some of which, more or less, are coming to consoles. To name a few:

One Last Thing:

Here’s a video podcast that I made for you guys showing some of the gems of this years PAX and informal interviews that I was able to capture. I hope you enjoy it.

PS3 vs Xbox 360

PS3 vs Xbox 360

Ian Gorrie — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 01:38:26 +0000

It’s interesting to have moved to a town like Seattle where people are very sensitive about speaking in anything other than the most glowing terms relating to Microsoft products. I’m not used to sugar coating opinions based on facts, so this has lead to some awkward situations where they have felt that I called their babies ugly.

It’s not the case. I was just sharing factual market conditions.

What is surely the case is that a lot more Xbox 360s have been sold than Playstation 3s. Xbox has a lot more titles, many of which I don’t particularly enjoy like console-based first person shooters. I tend to enjoy more Japanese-centric games as they tend to be more difficult and challenging and have a greater depth. In many cases, the Japanese game makers actually dumb down their games so that Western audiences will enjoy them.

Besides my long time gamer proclivity to continue to enjoy the Playstation controller I know so well and not really enjoying the aesthetic of the huge xbox controller, I have a list of other less obvious platform considerations that I’ve brought up many times in conversation.

First, my list of things I don’t like about 360s:

No built-in wireless networking
Predominately populated with a borderline retarded annoying teen gamer demographic
Controller design is only ok
You have to pay a membership fee to play online. Ridiculous!
Seems to be poor quality hardware and warranty support

One thing I do like is that they have the whole achievement application support thing down. I’m seeing some of my gamer friends Facebook profiles update when they unlock achievements on their games. That’s pretty neat and is something that the Playstation people should get around to doing soon. As seen in this thread, Sony isn’t being very smart about cultivating community interest:

The only thing you can do right now is pay for the Playstation 3′s SDK. $250,000!

Or, pick up the PSN SDK for around $50,000.

The price on the SDKs might be cheaper now. I haven’t checked in the last 6 months or so.

That’s a pretty serious commitment to make cute community application toys. It is no wonder that no one has made anything equivalent to the xbox application. Does Sony actually expect someone to pony up that amount of cash up front to make a social networking application supported by ads? They should be able to do better.

Some non-obvious things I like about the Playstation 3 include:

An older demographic. Something that is particularly hilarious is playing MotorStorm with a bunch of backwoods hillbillies on bluetooth headsets with nearly incomprehensible accents. It’s bizarre and awesome.
More ridiculously hardcore japanese gamers. The level of skill in the average Japanese fanboy seems to be several times that of the average western fanboy.
Wipeout HD

It seems we have entered the age of nickel dime annoyance for every little chunk of downloadable content, but it’s understandable given the amount of money spent on support and generation of these HD games.

Xbox has been spending a lot of money to get exclusives on downloadable content. That’s a pretty nice selling point, but as a consumer, you are paying for it with your never ending membership fees. Given the same problem, I’m content to wait a little longer and play on a PC system.

There are a lot of really bad games being released now. More money is being spent to develop them than at any other time in history. For this reason, in addition to the fact that I’ll likely be playing them anyway, I’m going to begin writing game reviews for Diehard Gamefan next year. It’s a fairly small group of guys, but they are very cool and I fit a somewhat uncommon niche so I feel that I can make a contribution.

My favorite podcast

Ian Gorrie — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:21:26 +0000

The only podcast I look forward to has to be the 1up show.

For example, a couple weeks ago they made fun of the silly poses to gain renown in the Fable games. It was completely hilarious gamer humor.

For the most part, they have really great insights into gaming. It’s largely the same kind of things that old school gamers like I and some of my friends would talk about. This is unlike 95% of the lame reviews that most of the internet throws around. Very rarely do they have lame fanboy moments like their Motorstorm review when a bunch of kids who only play burnout

I do still check out the g4 reviews, but they’re largely boring and uninteresting media professionals. They’re not my people. They’re just posers.